Forum - View topicAnswerman - Is Superhero Burnout at the Box Office Affecting Anime Films?
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GATSU
Posts: 16419 |
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I'm just wondering if the American manga market can handle Baki, Joe, and City Hunter. But fans should probably be glad MHA got to the end. Superhero fatigue could have hurt that series. Can we talk about 'isekai fatigue', though?
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AnswerJerome
Posts: 36 |
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I do like that suggestion a lot. "Is 'isekai fatigue' real?". I have no idea. I need you to give me some more information. Which long-running, or multiple-season arc isekai do you believe has suffered from a drop in viewership or interest, or which, in your opinion displays an obvious drop in quality? Isekai is the lean, white meat of the anime viewing experience. You can serve it to everyone. Like chicken or salmon at a wedding banquet. It'll keep the guests full. It is unlikely to offend anybody (Apart from the vegans and vegetarians), and it ticks the "Feed them something/anything" box before the dancing starts. I might save that for later. ;D |
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Wyvern
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My take is that people still like superhero movies, but there's just too damn many of them, and for some reason studios are addicted to the strategy of spamming these films instead of releasing them slowly to build up excitement.
Look at Marvel Studios in 2025. They released Captain America 4, Thunderbolts, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Daredevil: Born Again, Eyes of Wakanda, Ironheart, and Fantastic Four, all in a six month span. That's more than one Marvel release per month! A huge amount of content for most people! And since it's all a shared universe, most people don't know which ones the need to watch to be able to follow the stuff they like, so they end up ignoring all of it. Now look at DC. In the same span of time, they had one release: Superman, and it was more financially successful than any of Marvel's offerings. There was no intimidating glut of content, they just made one really good superhero movie and people got excited. And yes, it's true that this movie probably would have made much more money before the pandemic, but that's true of nearly all movies these days. And no, I'm not trying to do a Marvel VS DC thing, I'm just saying less is more. Look at 2024 and you'll see the reverse happen: last year, Marvel released only ONE film, Deadpool and Wolverine, and it was a box office smash and one of the highest-grossing movies ever made. The movies have fallen into the same trap as the comics: the shared universe thing was fun for a while, but now it feels like a chore to keep up with everything. Most people have one or two favorite heroes but at some point you decide "it's not worth it to watch four different movies I don't care about just so I'm prepared for when my favorite guy gets another sequel." If you release fewer movies at a time, though, you reduce this stress for the audience. |
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tintor2
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I recall some years ago people wrote an article of isekais. If there was something I was suffering last time is action series fatigue which ended me being charmed by the slave arc of Vinland Saga where the violence and rage of Thorfinn disappeared. Now I'm kinda having a romcom fatigue but I can't tell why. I watched some in Netflix which I enjoy but when starting Losing Heroines and left it in its second half and I couldn't see at all where it was going on. |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 5366 |
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I think the "created by committee" feeling is what has made me drift away from Western comics media in general. Retcons and reboots have become a go-to answer to give dwindling sales the occasional shot in the arm. And then it wears off, and they try again, which leaves it with a sense of not mattering. Sure, anime is definitely made by committee too, but it still comes back to one story at the center. That applies to the long stuff too. I don't know how accurate any of Oda's comments about One Piece being X% complete are, but I do believe he has a conclusion in mind.
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GATSU
Posts: 16419 |
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BTW, Demon Slayer made money overseas, but Suzume and Code White disappointed here. Plus, China tried to cash in with Ne Zha 2, and that did even worse than those two here. So, is the superhero stuff going to cause another correction of the manga/anime biz any time soon? Or is it an anomaly? (It doesn't help that Toriyama went the way of Stan Lee and Chadwick Boseman, either.) The problem is that the superhero stuff is doing badly when it's well received. Yeah, Supes beat Marvel this year, but it's not an Aquaman or Guardians 3. So, are we waiting for a bad plotline from Japan to spoil the barrel, too? If so, I hope it's not Scarlet....
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Glordit
 Posts: 1195 |
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I was invited by some friends about a year ago, to go watch a new superhero film (I forgot which one) they gave me a list of about 20+ films I needed to watch in order to "catch up" on the supposed lore, I politely declined. |
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LastPage 3
Posts: 291 |
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I don't know where this idea that you need to watch every piece of content in order to keep up came from. Sure you might need to watch Cap1 to understand Cap2, but you don't need to watch any of the shows to follow the movies. |
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 5154 Location: New York |
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Anything that has the superhero film genre downturn should theoretically boost other genres, be they other types of epics or Hollywood's reliable nephew that does a lot of work but as Rodney Dangerfield famously said ,"don't get no respect", horror.
The ultimate issue with anime films is that they're still viewed as a small-screen medium. You're going to get a huge 1st week box office for Infinity Castle, I bet, and then it's going to plummet at least 70% the following week. Not because of a disinterested audience, the Netflix rankings alone show a massive interest. But a lot of those people aren't going to see the film week 2 or 3, they're going to wait till it's on Netflix and watch it there. That's not the worst problem a medium can have, people are still engaging with it, but it's a big one. |
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Dr. Wily
Posts: 868 |
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I think a big factor people leave out when discussing superhero fatigue though is that the quality of superhero movies kind of dropped significantly post-Avengers Endgame. Sure there was the issue of people being overloaded, but the story might have been different if they were overloaded with good stuff. I can count on my fingers the number of genuinely enjoyable superhero movies/shows I've seen over the last 6 years. I guess the anime equivalent would be "imagine if for years you just got [INSERT YOUR FAVORITE ANIME'S WORST SEASON/ARC HERE] over and over", that series would probably see a lot of dropoff too.
People have praised Superman and Fantastic Four for seeming like a return to form, but it remains to be seen if that will be enough to keep people interested.
I mean you're not wrong but this is also how I feel when people tell me how good the new arc of One Piece is and I look at the episode count (or manga volumes) and just go "well... maybe one day..." The days of the "Big 3" series that just go forever are nearing their end, and (this may be a hot take) I think that's for the better. Just like it's hard to get people into superhero movies because there's too many, it's just a hard sell to get people into a product with a massive backlog. In my opinion, easy entry points are definitely where anime excels these days. The tons of seasonal anime that are often pretty short (even if that is sometimes a problem where a series has a cliffhanger ending and/or ends without resolving a major plot issue, then the series never gets a sequel) makes it infinitely easier for new viewers to get in. I'm behind on My Hero Academia and I feel like I'll definitely go back and finish it once the final season comes out, but this year I watched MHA Vigilantes, a series that requires me to know nothing about MHA (but has bonuses for people that do, like Stain's origin), and I loved it. That said, I think the lack of narrative depth is definitely a thing that is helping anime as well. I am actually a superhero comic reader, and a trend I've seen among myself and many of my friends who also read them is gravitating to stories based in alternate universes where familiar characters are allowed to grow and change in different ways rather than the mainline comics that have had a major stagnation problem since... well, probably the 80s/90s when characters stopped really aging or changing. |
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5734 |
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RDespair
 Posts: 263 Location: California |
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What's the biggest movie of the summer this year? K-Pop Demon Hunters.
What is incredibly anime-inspired? K-Pop Demon Hunters. |
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YagamiBlackstone255
Posts: 470 |
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I super duper hope super hero fatigue wont affect the Precure relaunch.
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GATSU
Posts: 16419 |
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BTW, Jerome bought up Demon Slayer. The movie was a sure thing for #1 this weekend here until Last Rites overperformed. So I hope that's not a correction...
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jdnation
Posts: 2510 |
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Even super hero fans are tired of Hollywood's superhero fare.
The same characters over and over again. And just as with the comics, the B-tier heroes aren't as successful. However, there are rare hits like The Penguin, which will boost THE BATMAN's sequel. The mukti-Universe multi-threaded multi-media affair is too demanding of the audience. It was great when it was just the 3 movie/year that the initial MCU had, but the shift of trying to get TV series etc. into it was too much. And once the audience is told or feels they can skip this or that show/movie, then they are going to be comfortable skipping more and being more selective. Especially when studios start putting in divisive liberal morality and political messaging in that mainstream audiences are also equally growing weary of and reject. Either way, we are tired or the same remix of caped heroes. Collapsed comic sales and box office reflect this. Anime doesn't have this problem, because anime is not a "shared multi universe". It is all individual stand alone series for the most part with a wide variety of genres and audiences excepting rare spin-offs. Even the overplayed isekai series don't depend on each other. A good series will stand out. American Comics could gain by adapting their source material faithfully in animation like manga does, but they don't. Outside of a few faithful takes like Sin City, Watchmen and 300, which did so to success, these are ignored, because American writers and Hollywood execs hate and look down on the source material just like they turn their noses up at animation for anything other than the youngest of children, so they rewrite and try to "improve" it or use it for their pet political vehicles which turn off the audiences these were originally for while failing to attract new audiences for the same reason. Anime and manga are therefore stepping in and eating their lunch. Rather than learn and compete, instead the dumb-dumbs will try and suppress anime/manga or license and ruin it the same way they do comics and did to Dragonball, Death Note and Kakegurui etc. Oda was right to keep One Piece on a tight leash. Hopefully more Japanese publishers do the same and reign in Hollywood's habitually destructive tendencies. |
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